“No—” This shake was more emphatic. “If they don’t know you’re here now, they soon will. And I can’t risk that. I’ve got other ruh-responsibilities. Your skin isn’t one of them.”
“So all that other stuff was just talk.” Bitter in his voice, like acid curling under his tongue.
“All your big concern about living things. Whether they’re human or not. I guess that doesn’t extend to blade runners.”
“Should it?” Isidore’s hand moved gently beneath the mechanical cat’s throat. “The creatures I help—replicant, human, whatever—they didn’t ask for the bad shit that happens to them. You duh-did. The hunter can’t complain when he becomes the hunted. Now you’re going to find out what it fuh-fuh-feels like. To be running for your life. To be afraid.”
To live in fear. He heard another voice, an old memory track, inside his head. That’s what it is . . . to be a slave. . . .
“I’ve already been there,” said Deckard, “I’m not going to learn anything new.”
“What a shame. It’s such a good ah-ah-opportunity.” Isidore set the mechanical cat down on the desktop, gave the creature a final pat on its shining head. It purred louder. “But then again . . . maybe you will. Learn something, that is. Like how to be a human.” He reached out and pressed a small button set into the side of the desk. “I make things real. As much as they can be. You’ve never been real. Now’s your chance.”
Deckard knew what the button was for. One of the thugs who’d brought him here—the heavy footsteps were probably coming down the hallway, heading for the office’s door.
As though the chair were a trap, already sprung—he couldn’t keep himself sitting. He stood up, jittery adrenaline in his veins. On the wall—he found himself staring at the pictures of dead Hannibal Sloat, the old photograph and the yellowed bit of newspaper. Fat and with hair in the photo, bald and fatter in the clipping. Time had walked through that low-resolution world.
He wasn’t looking at dead Sloat, the founder of the Van Nuys Pet Hospital. This close, nose a few inches from the wall, he could make out the other people in the clipping shot. The caption underneath was something about a cat named Ginjer—maybe a real one—getting ready to go to the stars: . . . complete checkup before embarking for the Proxima system. . . .
The grumpy-looking animal dangled from the dead man’s hands. The other man in the newspaper photo could’ve been anybody; Deckard didn’t recognize him.
The woman in the old clipping was Rachael.
No—he closed his eyes, sorting things out. And it’s not Sarah, either. The woman was Sarah’s mother, Ruth. The mother of Rachael, too, in a way. They all looked just the same, twins, triplets. The only difference was that Ruth had had her dark hair cut short, just enough left for a little fringe at the back of her neck. A practical cut, just right for climbing aboard the Salander 3—that was what the clipping was about—and setting off Prox-ward with her husband Anson Tyrell and their marmalade cat. And maybe the first few cells of their human daughter, already growing in Ruth’s womb. The couple looked radiant and happy, in that bright world of the past. To find what they were looking for, another world out in the stars. . . .
“Why did they come back?” Voice a wondering murmur, as Deckard studied the clipping. No answer there. “Why’d they come back to this world? This one sucks.” He would’ve said that even if there hadn’t been people, cops like he’d been, prowling through the city, looking for his death.
“I don’t know.” Isidore’s voice came from behind him. “Nobody does. It’s a mystery. Maybe Sarah knows. Maybe you should ask her about it sometime. If you ever guh-get the chuh-chance again.”
He glanced over his shoulder. There wasn’t time for anything more to be said. He heard the footsteps now, then the office’s door opening. The dark-uniformed man, the one who’d piloted the spinner that had brought him here, looked in.
“Mr. Deckard’s leaving now.” Isidore petted the mechanical cat on the desk, not looking up at either of the men, as though suddenly hit with an obscure shame. “Show him the way, please.”
“Happy to.” The pilot locked a grip on Deckard’s arm, pulled and then shoved, taking him out the door, pushing him past the wire cages.
Only a couple of minutes later he found himself outside a bigger and heavier door, steel studded with bolts. At street level, the sound of the Van Nuys Pet Hospital’s freight dock slamming shut echoed through the narrow canyon of the surrounding buildings.
Fine Mojave dust drifted across his shoes, an oven wind piling up miniature dunes in the empty streets’ gutters.
Deckard tilted his head back, looking up at the sun, letting its glare hammer into his eyes, unblinking tears shimmering toward steam.
A distant black speck moved across the sun’s fire.
Holden could see the luminous green line running across the face of the monitor. A humpbacked snake—That’s my pulse, he thought. It looked a million miles away, though he knew he just had to raise his hand to touch it. The black attach‚ case was strapped to his chest with a web of surgical tape. In the spinner’s cockpit, he managed weakly to raise the sheer tonnage of his head from the seat’s padding.
“What . . .” Tongue dry and thick, but without a stiff plastic air hose jammed down his throat. All the necessary tubing seemed to be down at his chest. “What’s going . . .” A tiny ball fluttered in a transparent valve with each word he breathed. “On . . .”
The man in the other seat, hands on the spinner’s controls, turned and looked at him. And smiled. “You blacked out there for a while.” He leaned over and checked the readings on the attach‚ case’s dials. “Seem to be doing okay, though. Know who you are?”
“Who . . .” The question puzzled him. Plus the smiling man’s face—he’d seen him before, but he didn’t know when or where. Crazy-looking smile—crazy meaning insane, or at least on the border of it—and a shock of white hair, spiky cropped. But the face was older, more wrinkled and lined than he thought he remembered it. What did that mean? “Who . . . am I . . .”
“Your name, pal. What’s your name?”
“Oh . . .” Not so hard, especially now that the drugs they’d been giving him in the hospital had started to wear off. The hoses in his chest stung; he had to fight an irrational urge to pull them out. “My name . . .” Deep breath, the little ball dancing higher. “Holden . . . Dave Holden . . .”
“Very good.” The smiling man reached over and tapped a finger against his forehead.
“They didn’t screw with anything up here, at least.”
It had started to seem that way. With more pain, more clarity, as though the hard sun, dimmed by the cockpit’s photochromic glass, was burning off a heavy fog bank. He knew he’d been there, in the hospital, hooked up to those, bigger machines, for a long time. A year?
Maybe more—as though he could now look down at the fog bank, wide as an ocean, the freight spinner having flown above both it and the tops of the L.A. towers.
At the farthest edge of the fog bank was his last unclouded memory. The last one before the woozy haze of the hospital ward.
Describe . . . only the good things that come into your mind about . . . your mother. That was his own voice, the last thing he’d spoken aloud in that other world. Where’d that been?
He concentrated, caught: at the Tyrell Corporation headquarters. In a room with two chairs, an overhead fan that’d barely stirred the stale, overprocessed air, and a table with a Voigt-Kampff machine sitting on it, the bellows inhaling and exhaling at the same speed as the attach‚ case strapped to his chest now. And another voice, thick, stupid, and resentfuclass="underline" My mother? Lemme tell you about my mother. . . .